This is the first of three screencasts where we begin to look at a few new Rails libraries to help you scale your Rails applications. In this first episode we take a look at Bullet, which will help you optimize your SQL queries by giving you growl notifications when you’re not using eager loading properly or should be using a counter cache. Then there’s Rails Indexes which provides Rake tasks to find missing indexes in your database. Finally the last library we’ll learn about is Scrooge, a SQL query optimizer which can reduce the amount of data getting sent from your database to your Rails application. All of these libraries I learned about from the Ruby5 Podcast, a twice weekly audio podcast covering the latest news in the Ruby and Rails Community.

In this talk I will present a task application framework called Tap. Tap on the surface acts like a supercharged rake, with similar declaration syntax and ease of use from the command line. On closer inspection, rake and tap address separate problems in separate domains that overlap in the simplest cases.

Tap facilitates:

imperative workflows

task configuration, inputs, documentation, and testing

gem-based distribution of task libraries

I've given a short (unpolished) version of the talk I would give at RubyConf at the Boulder Ruby Group meeting. Here is a link to the slides, and to the tap website:

http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=ddsz8fxd_271dt7zgnc5

http://tap.rubyforge.org

About Simon Chiang
Simon is a graduate student studying Biomolecular Structure at CU Denver. He develops bioinformatics tools in Ruby as a part of his thesis work, specifically for running workflows and analyzing proteomics data.

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Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:18:48 GMThttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/12/08/rubyconf-2008-tap-not-a-talk-about-replacing-rakeBestVideoshttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/12/08/rubyconf-2008-tap-not-a-talk-about-replacing-rakeRubyConf 2008: rush, a shell that will yield to youhttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/12/08/rubyconf-2008-rush-a-shell-that-will-yield-to-you

rush (http://rush.heroku.com/) as defined by the website is:

a replacement for the unix shell (bash, zsh, etc) which uses pure Ruby syntax. Grep through files, find and kill processes, copy files - everything you do in the shell, now in Ruby.

In this talk you will learn 2 things.

First we will go over some rush basics. Like globbing, search and replace, naming files, and processes.

Second we will add rush to common tools, such as, Rake, Sake, Textmate, Capistrano, and Thor.

About Nicholas Schlueter
Senior software engineer at RideCharge (http://www.ridecharge.com). RideCharge is a startup which means shared responsibility, but on a good day be found tweaking UI/UX related things. He has been developing websites for almost a decade. With over a year professionally in many languages, including perl, python, java, asp, javascript, and ruby.

Nicholas blogs at Simpltry (http://www.simpltry.com), it is a reflection of his love over the years. Whether it be JavaScript, TextMate, Ruby or the Tech Industry.

Recently, he has been hacking on a new gem call RushMate (https://github.com/schlueter/rushmate/tree). It attempts to bridge rush, the ruby shell written by Adam Wiggens and TextMate, everyone's favorite editor.

This talk would be a case study in using Ruby to deploy, monitor, and manage a cluster of servers running in the Amazon Web Services virtual cloud.

The example cluster is operated by OtherInbox.com, a consumer-driven website that automates email tasks and spam blocking. Every system administration task imaginable is carried out using Ruby, which means the developers can enjoy all of Ruby’s benefits without having to delve into shell scripting, writing cron tasks, or use of other languages. It also means that porting the application to run on different operating systems is a trivial task, because Ruby is the glue connecting the Ruby components together; all that is required is a Ruby interpreter.

Two key Ruby technologies have matured in the previous 18 months which make it ideal for almost every layer of managing a cluster of servers:

rufus-scheduler enables ruby-based scheduling (replacing cron, and providing a great facility for running daemons that must be executed on a recurring basis)

When combined with these Ruby workhorses, developers today can spend much more of their time writing Ruby code, and less time struggling with the vagaries of their production environment:

Ruby standard library utilities (File, FileUtils, etc.)

Rake

Capistrano (for any kind of remote application, not just Rails)

The talk would also include a discussion of using several different AWS gems to make cloud computing simple, by illustrating how Amazon’s S3 and SQS services can handle asychnronous work and communication between servers.

Mike SubelskyMike Subelsky is the lead developer of OtherInbox, an Austin-based startup using Rails to help consumers deal with email overload. He was a freelance web developer for two years before joining OtherInbox. Prior to becoming a full-time Ruby hacker, he served as a U.S. Navy information warfare officer with overseas assignments around the world for seven years. He has also worked as a civilian cybersecurity analyst for the Department of Defense and in private industry. He is the author of random-data, a open-source Ruby gem used for prototyping new Ruby applications, and two of his recipes are featured in the recently-released book Advanced Rails Recipes. He holds Bachelor and Master of Information Systems Management degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional. He blogs about Ruby and Rails at subelsky.com.

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Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:30:25 GMThttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/07/01/sd-ruby-episode-048-ruby-for-data-processingBestVideoshttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/07/01/sd-ruby-episode-048-ruby-for-data-processingRuby Plus #51: Sake for Rake in Railshttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/07/01/ruby-plus-51-sake-for-rake-in-rails

In this screencast you will learn about Sake and how to use it in Rails projects. Sake allows you to install rake tasks once and use it across all Rails projects.

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Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:21:24 GMThttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/07/01/ruby-plus-51-sake-for-rake-in-railsBestVideoshttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/07/01/ruby-plus-51-sake-for-rake-in-railsRuby and the Art of Domain Specific Languageshttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/06/27/ruby-and-the-art-of-domain-specific-languages

Summary
Rich Kilmer explains Domain Specific Languages and how they help working with domain experts. The presentation includes an overview of styles of external and internal DSLs in Ruby and explains implicit and explicit styles, complete with advantages and trade-offs of either approach. The presentation is rounded off with a look at imperative and declarative styles of DSLs.

Bio
Rich Kilmer is the founder of Virginia-based software company InfoEther, Inc where he is leading the development of a desktop-based Ruby + Flash consumer application. His technical background includes peer-to-peer software, wireless web, workflow, and pen computing.

About the conference
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community. QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

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Sat, 28 Jun 2008 05:40:10 GMThttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/06/27/ruby-and-the-art-of-domain-specific-languagesBestVideoshttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/06/27/ruby-and-the-art-of-domain-specific-languagesJRuby: Not Just Another JVM Languagehttp://www.bestechvideos.com/2008/06/19/jruby-not-just-another-jvm-language

Bio
Charles Nutter has been a Java developer since 1996, recently working as the senior Java architect at Ventera Corp and in September moved to Sun to work full-time on JRuby! He led the open-source LiteStep project in the late 90s and came to Ruby in the fall of 2004. Since then he has been a member of the JRuby team, helping to make it a true alternative Ruby platform.

About the conference
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community.QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

Summary
Jim Weirich, is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC and thecreator of rake, the popular make-like build tool written in Ruby. In this interview with InfoQ, Jim disccusses the birth of rake, Domain Specific Languages, and flexmock, his mocking library.

Bio
Jim Weirich is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, and is the creator of rake, the popular make-like build tool written in Ruby. Jim is very active in the Ruby community, presenting at many conferences and contributing to open source projects such as RubyGems. Jim blogs at http://onestepback.